Strawberry Tart

You cannot say you want to make a strawberry tart and use rotten strawberries. That is what my neighbor said to me today when he invited me for tea. Maybe he thought of that because on the terrace around us there were lots of people having strawberry tarts, or maybe because aside from being a very talented photographer Hervé has a lot of philosophies of life and most of them are quite abstract not unlike his photos. But this time I thought about the example as a good metaphor for life, or at least how we choose to live it.

Of course you would never make and much less serve a strawberry tart with molded strawberries because it would show. It would be disgusting and nobody would eat it. The blatantly rotten repels us. But how many times in life have we made, baked, and built on the rotten just because you couldn’t see it. The truth is that if you don’t do it with a strawberry tart you should not do it with anything else in life. Consistency is something that I’m slowly learning but the integrity that it gives me energizes me. To give your best you have to be your best.

If you ever forget, think about serving yourself as a moldy strawberry tart.

And it goes without saying, never serve anyone anything you wouldn’t eat yourself.